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Comment by shevy-java | Hacker News Reader

Hmmm. I do sometimes play old DOS games. And then the era of games that followed, say ... from 1995 to 2005 or so, give or take. Though quite rarely nowadays.

I'd wish there could be an improvement of some of the old games. Not to change their character per se, but to make some small modest improvements to e. g. gameplay, usability, perhaps even the graphics - without killing the old flair it had. Anyone remember Alone in the Dark? I liked the polygons, even though nobody would use these today. So that can probably not be improved a lot without ruining the old feeling. But content-wise? Where is AI when you need it? Can't AI autogenerate more content for those games AND also improve them modestly?

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Some of the source ports (and some of the reimagining) does exactly what you want:

Various DooM ports go beyond replicating "vanilla DooM" and even beyond updating graphics, to adding true 3D, etc.

VMCI and HotA go way beyond "Heroes III on modern machines"

Augustus expands on Julius until it's not just "Caesar 3" on current equipment.

> Where is AI when you need it?

Back in 2003 or so some wonderful smart folks added accessibility to the Quake engine. Since then, there have been very few accessible FPS games.

I just took Claude, dropped it in the AudioQuake engine directory, asked it to write up a taxonomy of the accessibility solutions used to make quake accessible, waited, dropped the EDuke32 source next to it, and said "Let's plan for how we can make this accessible now using similar techniques."

I now have the beginning of a working accessibility mod[0], and am walking around replaying Hollywood Holocaust, something I haven't been able to do since I played with my dad (him driving and me shooting). It's kind of amazing, actually.

I am totally blind.

[0]: https://gist.github.com/ctoth/f955884813dd0daa497914108c467c...

> Can't AI autogenerate more content

We have so many old books and movies. Can't AI autogenerate more content so that we had more Fellini movies or at least more Sherlock Holmes stories? Most worthy games have quite some work behind them.

If all you need is more levels for old games, certainly there are competent level generators for Doom and Quake, but don't expect them to produce something like Arcane Dimensions.

There are a lot of remakes of old games. Nintendo has done this a lot, but one challenge is these old games all come with IP and copyright, so it's hard to remake a game even with the technology. You have to have ownership and a good reason to believe people will buy a slightly updated game.

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